[Development of a competence catalogue for physicians in training for curriculum creation with respect to delivery...

Anesthesiologic expertise is used at various points in the delivery room. The natural turnover of professionals requires continuous education and training for patient care. In a first survey among consultants and trainees, the desire for a delivery room-specific anesthesiologic curriculum has emerged. In order to enable a curriculum with decreasing supervision, a competence-oriented catalogue is used in many medical fields. The gain in competence develops gradually. The participation of practitioners should be obligatory to avoid a differentiation between theory and practice. The structural framework of curriculum development by Kern et al. provides the learning objective analysis after further evaluation. In the sense of specific learning objective definition, the present study aims to describe the competences for anesthetists in the delivery room.

An expert group (active in the anesthesiology delivery room environment) developed a set of items via a two-step online Delphi survey. The experts were recruited from the German Society for Anesthesiology and Intensive Care Medicine (DGAI). We evaluated the resulting parameters for relevance and validity in a larger collective. Lastly, we used factorial analyses to identify factors that could be used to group items into relevant scales. In total, 201 participants took part in the final validation survey.

During the prioritization process of Delphi analyses, competencies such as neonatal care were not followed up. Not all items developed are exclusively delivery room-related, such as managing a difficult airway. Other items are specific to the environment of obstetrics. One example is integration of spinal anesthesia into the obstetric context. Some items are exclusively related to the delivery room, such as in-house standards of care in obstetrics as a basic skill. After validation, a competence catalogue with 8 scales with a total of 44 competence items resulted (Kayser-Meyer-Olkin criterion 0.88).

A catalogue of relevant learning objectives for anesthetists in training could be developed. It specifies the generally required content of anesthesiologic training in Germany. Specific patient groups, such as patients with congenital heart defects, are not mapped. Competencies that could also be learned outside the delivery room, should be learned before the rotation. This enables the focus on the delivery room items, especially for those to be trained who do not work in a hospital with obstetrics. The catalogue needs to be revised for completeness for its own working environment. Particularly in hospitals that do not have a pediatrician available, neonatal care becomes significant. Didactic methods, such as entrustable professional activities, have to be tested and evaluated. These enable competence-based learning with decreasing supervision and reflect the reality in hospitals. As not every clinic can provide the necessary resources for this a nationwide provision of documents would be helpful.